Now that Geocities is closing what should I do with my sites there?

[MrSpeed]

I have a number of small niche sites at Geocities. Very white hat and many are listed in directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo.

In addition there is a tiny but steady adsense flow and I sometimes link out to my larger sites to pass along pagerank.

I don't think I can do a 301 redirect with some kind of server side scripting.

Ideas?

[Gomvents]

for now do a meta refresh redirect and contact the larger directories to let them know to update the url, this is easy to do with DMOZ and Yahoo and you can contact some of the other more important linkers to have. other than that i can't think of anything else you can do. Anyone else have further suggestions?

[encyclo]

Are Geocitites still allowing content updates? Theoretically, many search engines consider a zero-second meta refresh as an equivalent of a 301 redirect. It's a sub-optimal solution of course, not least due to the work involved setting it up, but you could replace every static page on your Geocities sites with a meta refresh to the equivalent content moved to a new domain. Keep the same exact content and URL structure if you can, but on a domain you control.

Of course, when Yahoo finally shuts down the Geocities sites, you will lose the effect of the redirects, but it might give you a head-start whilst trying to get links updated to the new URLs.

[engine]

For the record, this was announced [webmasterworld.com] some time back, and there are some suggestions in there.

FYI
[help.yahoo.com...]

[MrSpeed]

I can't believe someone isn't scooping in to buy geocities. There's a crazy amount of incoming links and I am positive you can make a profit with ads

[Mohamed]

I can't believe someone isn't scooping in to buy geocities. There's a crazy amount of incoming links and I am positive you can make a profit with ads

If Yahoo could not make money from it, then who else. I don't think goecity is viable business any more, it is so 90ish.

[MrSpeed]

The thing about large corporations is they'll cut products/services if they don't make enough money, even if they are turning a profit.

[Gomvents]

how can they not make money from it though ESPECIALLY now that bandwidth and server hardware is dirt cheap and much more powerful than it was before. They could have chosen to restrict bandwidth, storage, etc. I personally am not affected by this, but it kind of feels like part of the internet is dying. Geocities was the first host I ever used, and i'm assuming that's true for many of you out there.

[JS_Harris]

They can't make money from it because geocities sites in general do not rank well in search engines and people who use free hosts don't tend to pay to advertise their site.

The same content on standalone domains does remarkably better that it did while on Geocities, in my experience.

The hidden gem in Geocities is found in its content which I'm surprised is unceremoniously going to be dumped. There are several geocities sites with content I'd love to purchase from their current owners but I can't find out who they are...

[frontpage]

I wish you look in getting DMOZ to update your links. I have tried for years to get a response from anyone there regarding our out of date links. I even tried their forum with no response. I even applied to be an editor in a niche I have a doctorate in and have no website and did not even get a response.

Besides, who besides webmasters really use DMOZ anymore. It once was the key to being indexed but not any longer.

[Lorel]

I say let Geocities die off. It's only good for those that don't have a commercial site. Most directories won't accept a site with a sub domain (Yahoo/GeoCities) or a freebie site either and if you ever turn your site into a commercial site then you have to get your own domain or it will never go anywhere and that means loosing a lot of links and PR, age of domain, trust rank, etc etc.

[callivert]

<i>They can't make money from it because geocities sites in general do not rank well in search engines and people who use free hosts don't tend to pay to advertise their site. </i>
yet blogspot and wordpress are doing fine.

[KanukBoy]

Sorry if this is off-topic.

Some of my backlinks come from Geocities sites. Will my pagerank suffer when these sites dissapear?

Does google have any plans to somehow hold onto all the link information they cherish so much?

Thanks

[callivert]

my guess is that you will lose valuable links.
How much this will hurt will probably depend on if they're a part of an overall strong link profile or not.
But surely anyone with old Geocities links pointing to them has an aged, authority site and not much to worry about. maybe you need to think of your Geocity links as booster rockets. They got you this far... but now they're being ejected and falling away.